A co-location facility provider (a “provider”) may employ a communication facility, such as a data center or warehouse, in which multiple customers of the provider locate network, server, and storage gear and interconnect to a variety of telecommunications, cloud, and other network service provider(s) with a minimum of cost and complexity. Such co-location facilities may be shared by the multiple customers. By using co-location facilities of the provider, customers of the provider including telecommunications providers, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), application service providers, service providers, content providers, and other providers, as well as enterprises, may enjoy less latency and the freedom to focus on their core business.
Customers co-located at a co-location facility typically lease space or storage capacity for a set duration. Assets at a co-location facility, such as cabinets, cages, and ports, may provide customers the leased space or storage capacity. Some assets leased by customers at a co-location facility may become unavailable for which corrective action is needed.
Cloud computing refers to the use of dynamically scalable computing resources accessible via a network, such as the Internet. The computing resources, often referred to as a “cloud,” provide one or more services to users. These services may be categorized according to service types, which may include for examples, applications/software, platforms, infrastructure, virtualization, and servers and data storage. The names of service types are often prepended to the phrase “as-a-Service” such that the delivery of applications/software and infrastructure, as examples, may be referred to as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), respectively.
The term “cloud-based services” or, more simply, “cloud services” refers not only to services provided by a cloud, but also to a form of service provisioning in which cloud customers contract with cloud service providers for the online delivery of services provided by the cloud. Cloud service providers manage a public, private, or hybrid cloud to facilitate the online delivery of cloud services to one or more cloud customers.
In some cases, the co-location facility provides interconnection services by which customers of the provider may interconnect to one another over the co-location facility infrastructure or by which a customer of the provider may interconnect its spatially and/or geographically distributed customer networking equipment over the co-location facility infrastructure. The co-location facility may in such cases be referred to as an “interconnection facility.” The facility provider may provide services accessible to co-located customers via an interconnection, such services including, for example, a cloud exchange, Internet access, an Internet exchange, “metro connect” for reaching other communication facilities within a metropolitan area, a cross-connect from one customer to another, and other interconnection services. An interconnection may in some cases span multiple logical network boundaries defined by networks deployed by multiple different customers of the provider co-located, in some respect, within the co-location facility and including enterprise, managed services provider, network service provider, cloud service provider, and service reseller customers, for instance. These various co-location facility customer networks, each of which may make up at least a portion of the interconnection, may employ heterogeneous network equipment and network management technologies and protocols.